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Working in the world of tech innovation for my entire professional life, I've seen firsthand how new developments can completely change both our day-to-day lives and our understanding of the world. So I’m always paying attention to trends about the interplay of technology and the human experience.

In a recent interview in The Atlantic, historian Yuval Harari elaborated on this point, portraying a vision of the future when computers will assist us with making decisions -- perhaps better than our friends. But in my opinion, it went too far when Harari stated that drawing on the power of big data to know our minds better than we can means that the “traditional notion of free will no longer make practical sense.”

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Why does this not ring true? After all, we’re comfortable with the idea of computers and robots being better than us in many ways: They're faster and more accurate with calculations, and they make decisions free of emotional distractions.

But who we are as people -- including the exercise of our free will, in which we choose the lives we want to lead -- can’t be modeled by a computer, because we are each unique and embedded in our particular lives. Our uniqueness is just as much about our environments and daily experiences as it is about our neurons and DNA.

Yet that doesn’t mean computers can’t assistus in being all we can be, making the most informed decisions and having the best knowledge at the right moment. Far from robbing us of free will, technology allows a greater flourishing of it. As a software engineer and entrepreneur who uses AI to alleviate menial tasks, I believe it has the potential to free up our minds for more spiritual and noble ideas.

Tools For A Smarter Free Will

One of the most challenging aspects of making decisions concerns our careers. Now, there is a wealth of tools for just that. The newest entrants in this space will use artificial intelligence to accelerate that process.

Beansprock, for example, is a job placement platform that leverages AI algorithms to give job seekers an intuitive way to enhance the job hunt and decision process that goes with it.

AI will work on both sides of the employment equation, with human resources departments using AI to predict the success of an employee on the basis of behavior. For example, imagine a job candidate uses the wrong combination of words in a monitored meeting. The AI could tag the candidate as a likely liability to the company, even though he or she has yet to do anything wrong.

Keeping Hearts In Rhythm

In fact, AI will guide our choices in most critical areas: those that most deeply test our sense of free will and control our fate, such as our health behaviors. AI has already proven efficient at predicting heart attacks -- even better than doctors. Of course, predicting diseases and medical conditions have far-reaching implications to our free will. People will make life-changing decisions about diet, environment, and even spouses by an AI's recommendation.

Personal health-monitoring apps are already shaping our behaviors in this way. I use Strava to monitor my running pace and calories burned. Measuring drives me to improve: One day I burn 600 calories, but unless I exceed that the next day, my brain will not release as much dopamine when reading the results, so I won’t feel a sense of reward. Because we humans are driven by such rewards, we try harder.

For those who really want to take it to the logical extreme, now you can even combine such trackers with DNA analysis to tell people what they are capable of, allowing them to push their personal limits, such as with offerings from DNAFit.

Monitoring apps are not just for athletes. Rthm helps everyday users apply their genetic test information to improve their sleep and health routines. In the next few years, look for more personal health care assistants to reshape how we make wise decisions about our health and wellbeing.

Getting Spiritual

Sure, career and health are critical areas for making good decisions, but they are one step removed from our souls, right? That is often reserved for decisions about the ultimate expression of ourselves: the domain of creativity but also of love, particularly in our romantic relationships.

But here, too, AI is beginning to exert itself. For a few years now, there have been early attempts to use algorithms to predict success in romantic relationships. One uses couples’ tones of voice to predict relationship success. Another analyzed thousands of couples and came up with a list of six questions to predict the chances of a relationship lasting. But these are only the beginning. The future of AI relationship coaches may be truly incredible.

Personal decision-assisting software will change us, yes. But it will not remake us into cold, calculating machines. On the contrary, by offloading the tedium and complexity of these decisions to finely tuned AI algorithms, these tools will encourage our free will to thrive -- allowing us to choose what’s best for us and our world.